Dear Anne, 2025, 4-channel HD video installation, 25 min 16 sec..

Dear Anne is an artistic inquiry into Walton Hall, the world’s first nature reserve, established by Charles Waterton at the beginning of the 19th century in the United Kingdom. Originally intended as a walled and protected sanctuary for birds, it is now the site of an exclusive golf club. In a series of videos, presented as letters to Waterton’s wife Anne, Sarah Van Marcke investigates how this landscape reveals our ideas about nature, ownership, and history. Dear Anne questions the nature reserve as a constructed space in which care, control, and exclusion are deeply intertwined.

The video installation was developed during a residency near Walton Hall, where Van Marcke delved into the lesser-known history of Anne Edmonstone: a young woman of Guyanese descent who came to the estate through an arranged marriage and lived in the heart of the reserve. Through her story, Van Marcke traces the site's transformation — from conservation to exclusivity — and its enduring links to colonial plantation economies that helped finance the creation of the estate. Past and present merge in a landscape where the scars of history remain tangible today.

Text on ‘Dear Anne’ by Liesbeth Decan (June, 2025)

Not Charles Waterton (1782–1865) – the eccentric naturalist and passionate taxidermist, known as the founder of the first nature reserve and immortalized in a painted portrait in the National Portrait Gallery in London – is the protagonist in Sarah Van Marcke’s recent video work, but rather Anne Edmonstone (1812–1830) – the Guyanese woman who, at the age of seventeen, was assigned to Waterton, married him in Bruges, moved to his English estate, and died there at the age of eighteen, shortly after the birth of their son.

Sarah first encountered her in a few brief mentions in the entertaining biographies of her husband and in a handful of letters written by Anne, found in the Waterton Archive at the Wakefield Museum. She decides to write her back.

Mist and the quacking of ducks herald the day in Walton and also form the prelude to a first letter to Anne, dated September 4, 2023. From the manor house where Anne once lived – now a luxury hotel – the artist reactivates Anne’s life story, which patriarchal historiography has long left underexposed. She puts herself in the shoes of the young woman, who struggles with her pregnancy and the longing for her homeland – then still British Guiana.

In another video letter, Sarah spies on golfers from the undergrowth as they calmly walk through the frame; she describes an encounter with children searching for golf balls; and – through the similarity with bird eggs – she leaps back to the past, when Walton Hall was an extraordinary bird paradise. As free as the birds were, so trapped was Anne. This duality seems to be reflected in Sarah’s hybrid use of moving and still images: she films a living scene with a fixed camera angle or pans the camera over a photograph, an inherently immobile depiction. Thus, both photo and film move slowly, as carriers of the complex story of progressive ecological thinking on the one hand and a deeply rooted colonial ideology on the other.

The video works that alternate with the two letters do not speak in words, but in sound, music, and image. In one, we fly upside down for several minutes over the golf course. A cello study co-composed by Sarah, evokes the song of the mistle thrush and accompanies the inverted promotional drone video of the golf club – a game-like grassland. The sound is repetitive – like a mantra, muffled, melancholic, but also powerful and insistent. Instead of alluring, the landscape becomes disorienting. Once again, we feel Anne’s presence on the estate and her early death as the dark undercurrent beneath the perfectly trimmed golf course.

In the final piece, images glide by of birds brought over from South America and taxidermied by Waterton. The glitches in the scans seem to represent the fractures and scars in history.

Dear Anne highlights and connects life stories, places, times, and ideological frameworks, and invites a reconsideration of both past and present.

Liesbeth Decan

Brussels, June 2025